I love Instapaper. It’s basically replaced Google Reader as my content-consumption medium of choice. I have the “Read Later” bookmarklet installed in my browser so whenever I find something interesting on the interwebs during the work day I just flag it for later and (hopefully) get to it that evening.
I’m trying to make it a point to clear my queue at the end of every day either by ditching or reading the articles I’ve thrown in there, but personally, I like to have an idea of the number of articles I have ahead of me (mostly to decide if I should plop on the couch and dive in or if it’s something I can finish off on my phone on the bus). No where on Instapaper does it tell you how many articles you’ve saved! Definitely an interesting design choice!
Anyway. After looking at my queue tonight I realized that it had gotten a bit out of control. I wanted to know how many articles I had ahead of me. So I wrote a little JS snippet and ran it in firebug. Bam! I had my answer (427 if you’re curious).
Then I realized I’d probably want to do this again, so I made a browser bookmarklet out of it. I thought others might be as obsessive about unread counts as I, so I thought I’d stick the bookmarklet up here for anyone so inclined.
Just drag and drop this link into your bookmarks bar. If you click it while you’re viewing your list (on instapaper.com/u), it’ll give you a nice old fashioned pop up alert. Dead simple, but useful! Enjoy!